New season

My broad beans are higher than the apple trees. I spent so long looking up, watching the tips race to the sky, I missed the beans down below until I stumbled upon them today when I was searching for snails. And so the first of the much anticipated seasonal treats has arrived. Soon there will be tomatoes, corn and basil, peaches and the flood of produce from the garden, where they currently grow quietly stuffed in between the flowers.

Despite my overlooking them, the beans are still small, small enough to avoid the double peeling that stops me making full use of the bushels of beans I collect. I boiled them up and we had them over risotto, with grilled asparagus on the side. Jackie French has written that you'll never feel poor with a vegetable garden filled with luxuries - this was very true tonight.

A little bit of what you fancy does you good

The other day at Clarendon Al turned to me and said, "There's a lot to be said for this kind of thing".

For a man who's long subscribed to the philosophy of if you can't eat it don't plant it, this was a turnaround, but not an unexpected one. The garden has become something of An Issue, at times even A Point of Contention, and once or twice sharp words have been spoken over who has failed to do what. This in turn is a cause for resentment - how has it come to pass that a place that for so long was a touchstone of my identity, one of the few rem(a)inders of a pre-child me, has turned into just one more thing to do?

Occasionally I read about the most luscious of gardens, filled with good things to eat, and apparently kept going on ten minutes a day. I've not managed that. The watering, the planning, the care of the soil eats into my time and is always managed with Nell on my hip and Lu tripping along beside me, wishing we were playing 'foot stuck'*. So we've had some nice veggies from the garden this year but aside from the peaches and zucchinis, not the bounty I'd hoped for.

But that's okay. For the moment I'm giving up my The Good Life dreams and recognising that I'm not a peasant and my family won't starve without a big harvest of tomatoes. I'm reading Jackie French again (and again, and again) and she writes that total self-sufficiency is a grim prospect; much better to grow what you want, what gives life richness and depth. Just growing anything without pressure does that for me, but the following things give me particular joy:
* towers of corn
* beefsteak tomatoes and cherry tomatoes for salads
* new potatoes for boiling and frying
* as much pesto as possible
* zucchinis
* broad beans to eat with Morrocoan meals and in a dip with goats feta
* raspberries, raspberries, raspberries
* lots of different lettuce for salads

With these in the garden, I don't feel poor or put upon. No-one wants to skimp and when I grow my own I don't have to. So while I'll keep planting other things, it doesn't matter so much what happens with them. Because the other luxury in my life is time when there's nothing demanding to be done. And at the moment, this is in inverse proportion with the number of plants in the veggie garden.

But thing thing that got me thinking and remembering was a comment from French's website: flowers are important. It's hard to feel deprived with a big bowl of pink roses in the room. But I want the right kind of flowers. I'm not so keen on those prim little buds in pink, red and yellow; I like things overblown and colourful, generousity spilling out all over. When it comes to flowers I like an excess of gorgeousness. Al, ever the poet, put it this way: "I don't really notice it but it's nice to have some things in vases something over there". Indeed.

We've had flowers in the garden this last, rather difficult year. But I've not often made the effort to move them into the house. It's been another 'one more thing'. When picking flowers gets mixed up in a general feeling of hopelessness about the garden, the house, the washing, the grocery shopping, the general never-ending-ness of domestic tasks, then it's time to do something about how I see the garden and about how I see my life.

So it's back to a re-think. This is always hard for me as I can be a little ... rigid. But there's something liberating and exciting about letting go of old expectations and allowing new ways of being in my life and my garden to emerge. I'm thinking many big, vulgar, pink roses (which is just how I like them), poppies bobbing in happy drifts, tulips, irises and lupins and anything else that takes my fancy. I've got at least half of these things in the garden already; the trick is to remember it, and when the glass feels half empty, to fill it with flowers.


* I get my foot stuck in a rock in a tidal river and Lu rescues me from certain drowning with a reed through which to breathe and levers to move the rock. I am tearful and grateful and hail her as a hero. And repeat.

Still talking about zucchinis

Quite possibly the perfect pasta sauce, and the reason I plant more zucchinis than I'd ever really need:

Take a few cloves of garlic and soften in oil with three rashes of bacon, if you're the kind who likes their meat (otherwise, leave them out). Very finely slice three of four young zucchinis - if they're a mix of colours then so much the better. Stir in with the garlic and bacon until everything is cooked but not at all brown. Now is a good time to stir in some pesto if you have any (but here I would specify homemade as it tends to lack the harshness of the stuff you buy in bottles; I think the pine nuts might matter here) and regardless, bind the whole with a little cream, season and leave to bubble. Then toss in any flowers that came in with the fruit, ladle over pasta and offer to an appreciative audience with some parmesan on the side.

We eat this with two yelling kids, one who'll only have the green stuff and the other who'll eat the pasta. There's usually some wining on the topic of "I don't like conversation", food thrown to the floor, milk sloshed on shirts by a 13 months child who refuses to acknowledge she needs to work on her hand-eye coordination, and a few shouts at the dogs to get out of the dining room. But I am working towards a more fabulous context:

Serve outside under the grapevine, with perhaps a cold riesling (though really, I wouldn't know), a salad from the garden, good friends who appreciate the six months taken to produce the meal, and Bach playing through the open windows of the house.

Maybe next summer

The human condition

A friend called me yesterday.

"Hi. How are you?" (tone: chipper)
"Oh, good. I'm making chutney." (tone: resigned)
"Zucchinis?" (tone: sympathetic)
"Oh yes." (tone: sad and beaten down)

We're separated by thousands of kilometres, we haven't met up for three years, but when you're friends with a gardener, they always know what you're going through. And like all really good friends, there's no judgment of me letting those zukes grow to horrifying proportions, no "I told you sos" over the number of plants encouraged, and a confession of a basket of zukes sitting balefully in her own kitchen.

For all those who suffer under the yoke of productivity, here's a useful place to go: Jackie French might just re-invigorate your enthusiasm for the marrows. Maybe.

Lessons learned

It's still too hot to garden - I'm a delicate Tasmanian type and anything above 25 degrees is a shock to my system - but the enforced inactivity leaves precious time to plan and scheme and reflect on my summer in the garden. And here's what I've learned:

Now that I'm caring for two daughters, it takes one minute to plant seeds (pak choy and rocket), five minutes to prepare the soil and three weeks to find the time to do it.

Anything red and luscious needs to be netted, not against birds but against a greedy two year old who can't wait until tomorrow when something will be perfectly ripe. For Lu, vaguely pink-ish and not so hard it will crack a tooth counts as ripe. We've had a few strawberries and a reasonable amount of raspberries but she's yet to taste one that I'd count as ripe.

Regardless, semi-ripe home grown strawberries still taste so much better than those in the shops.

Four zucchini plants is three too many for a family of four (only three of us have teeth). Each year I over-plant and each year my partner reminds of past mistakes but the German peasant in me can't grow just one of anything: what if my children starve?; what if there's not enough relish and zucchini loaf to get us through the long winter ahead?

Connected to the above, no one wants a zucchini. Eggs and red, round tomatoes are eagerly accepted, everyone loves a home grown peach, but it's "thanks but no thanks" to those poor, unloved zucchinis.

And related to the above, if a zucchini grows so big it scares your kid or could be used as a weapon, then you're not on top of your zucchini harvest.

If you turn your back on a child and your seed packets you might not be planting a carefully planned and much anticipated nine different varieties of tomatoes; you might instead find you were working with mixed up seeds when seven Sweetie tomato bushes grow in place of the longed for Brandywines and Amish Pastes.

Gardening with my children fills me with such love and pride. I had no idea that digging around in the soil and pulling things off plants could offer so much to my soul. My garden and my family are blessed joys and great gifts.

Eating from the garden: yet more eggs for breakfast as the chooks try to convince us to keep them; tomatoes and basil on pizzas for lunch; carrot, beans, leeks and corn in a chicken noodle soup for dinner; the last blood plum, raw corn and beans for snacks.

Back to basics

My corn is so lush. It should be - I've offered it bags of manure, compost and mulching with the straw from the chickens. It's taller than me - it's as high as an elephant's eye - and laden with cobs. It embodies the promise of harvest. I think it is beautiful.



Then, come lunch time, when it's stripped back and lying prone ( a bit like a plucked chook) it's hard to see its previous glory.



But bite into it and the soft sweetness renders it remarkable again.

Eating from the garden: corn, chives and eggs in pancakes for breakfast; corn for lunch; basil in pesto at dinner, followed by rhubarb and more eggs in a cake for dessert; blood plums and tomatoes for snacks.

Sexy

Is it just me, or are climbing beans truly sexy? Long and lean, elegant, casually hanging about the place. They put me in mind of a snake-hipped, Edwardian man about town from the upper classes, smoking a cigarillo and watching the debutantes with a knowing smile on his face. Well, that's sexy for me. All this titillation from the prosaically named "lazy housewife".

Eating from the garden: sweet corn for lunch; pesto and pasta salad with my basil, beans and tomatoes mixed with goat's cheese, eggplant and roasted capsicums.